AI-ready Data Management Practices:
Alaska Ice Seals and Harbor Seals
2024-05-17
Polar Ecosystems Program
NOAA Fisheries - Alaska Fisheries Science Center
Harbor seals and 4 species of ice-associated seals
Abundance and distribution of all species
Image Data Streams
All image processing handled through Kitware’s VIAME software:
Ice Seal Surveys
Glacial Harbor Seal Surveys
Coastal Harbor Seal Surveys
KAMERA System
Kitware Image Acquisition ManagER and Archiver
Ice Seal Surveys
Use in-flight KAMERA system to collect infrared, RGB, and UV imagery.
Use detection model to identify hotspots in the thermal imagery.
Currently, manually review all thermal hotspots for species identification, but the development/evaluation of a color classification model is underway.
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Glacial Harbor Seal Surveys
Use in-flight KAMERA system to collect infrared and RGB imagery.
Two types of surveys:
For lower-altitude surveys, use detection model to find hotspots in the thermal imagery (using thermal model developed for ice-associated seals). Review color imagery to classify harbor seals.
For higher-altitude surveys, use suppression and ignore zones to indicate areas of overlap. Manually review all images and annotate all seals. Duplicates are flagged during post-processing.
Coastal Harbor Seal Surveys
Collect oblique imagery in-flight using digital SLR camera.
Images are reviewed to label them as counted, uncounted, or background.
Once images are selected, run R code to generate image lists for selected images and manually review and annotate seals.
AI-Ready Data Efforts
Annotate all seals and subset as appropriate for population analyses.
Standardize annotation labeling for ease of cross-project training (for staff) and for combining datasets for different AI/ML needs.
Store standardized outputs from each project schema as queries (not all data were collected/processed the same way over the years, so this gives us equivalent data structures to work with).
Store image names, network paths and image-information data in DB structure (allows for ad hoc queries).
Track how images are/were used (manual review, training, test, validation, background (no seals)).
Develop functions in pepDataConnect R package for generating image lists and/or annotation files for use in DIVE.
Thank You
Aerial survey leads (Erin Moreland, Josh London, John Jansen) + program staff
Kitware (VIAME and KAMERA development)
